September Girls (16 page)

I was older now. We all were. It wasn’t that simple anymore.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

THIRTEEN

WHEN I WOKE up the next morning, the house was empty and reeked of cigarette smoke. The TV was on, tuned to some soap opera, and the volume was blaring. I noticed a coffee mug sitting on the end table, stuffed with barely smoked butts, the filters emblazoned with thin green rings and stained at the ends with plum-colored lipstick blots.

This from a woman who once told me that if she ever caught me smoking a cigarette she would send me to live with my grandmother in Shreveport. The worst of it is that I had believed her. A part of me still sort of did.

I poured myself some cereal, switched the channel, and flopped onto the couch to finally watch
The Price is Right
. This had been my original plan for the summer before it had been rearranged in front of me, first by my father and then by DeeDee.

But
The Price is Right
was not the same as I’d remembered it. That day, the old ladies squealing as they
came on down
weren’t as amusing as they had once been. I no longer felt my usual swell of vicarious happiness when the army vet won the Subaru. Even Plinko had lost its luster.

I wondered if my boredom at all this meant I had finally become a man after all.

No, I decided. I just had my mind on other things. The whole time I was watching the show I was wishing DeeDee were there with me. She’d been a maid last summer; she would surely probably know exactly how much Windex cost. And I had this feeling she would have an appreciation for a good Showcase Showdown.

A woman was jumping up and down and weeping after winning a dinette set, a Ski-Doo, and a trip to Reykjavik, and, feeling nothing but antsiness, I gave up. This waiting around was hell.

I was going to go find her. She would be working, probably, but I could at least say hi. So I made the walk to the restaurant hoping that she would be there and wondering how I would find her if she wasn’t. I can’t say that Kristle’s warning the previous day wasn’t bothering me at all. As much as I tried to put it out of my mind, every time the
Price is Right
buzzer had sounded, I had imagined DeeDee looking me in the face and opening her mouth to speak and only that loud, awful buzz coming out.
Too high, buddy, try again next time.

But then I’d remember the way she had looked at me when I’d walked in on her at Kristle’s birthday party, and the way she had laughed when we’d been drunk on the mermaid statue at the golf course. The two of us in the sand with the sun setting on a beach that belonged only to us. There was no way all of that hadn’t been real. Kristle was just full of shit as usual.

She was back at the restaurant. I saw her beyond the saloon door as I approached, beyond the always-abandoned hostess station, distractedly taking an order from a sullen family and looking sullen to match them. Something about how she was fidgeting with the pen at her ear—the pensive way she was biting her lip—made me almost rethink my plan. I just had a bad feeling.

But in my hesitation, DeeDee looked up and saw me and gave a weak smile. It seemed in that moment of uncertainty that she was gathering herself. There was no turning back now. She glanced to her customers apologetically and then up at me again and raised an index finger in my direction—
wait
.

I waited. She disappeared into the kitchen and reemerged a few seconds later and came toward me. Her smile had a hint of a wince to it.

“Come outside for a second,” she said. “I told Olay to cover. We’ll see how
that
goes.” And I followed her outside the restaurant onto the end of the fishing pier, the same spot where we’d first met.

She lit a cigarette and leaned back on her elbows on the railing but then changed her mind and stood, lifting her chin and straightening her back.

I shuffled my feet. I had been expecting something different. Maybe things were not what I had thought after all.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked awkwardly. “Kristle said you were feeling sick.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was just one of those things.”

“My mom came back,” I said. “We got back to the cottage and her car was there and . . .” I trailed off. DeeDee’s eyes were unfamiliar.

“The thing is,” she said, “I have to work today. It’s really busy in there. Kristle’s playing hooky with your brother and Olay’s a disaster.”

“It’s cool,” I said. “Tomorrow or something?”

She shrugged. “Maybe? Let’s play it by ear, okay?”

“Cool,” I said. “Definitely. For sure.”

DeeDee gave me a kiss on the cheek and walked back down the pier toward the restaurant. I climbed over the rail and dropped into the sand, where I lay for a while before getting up and moving on.

When I came upon Dad a mile down the beach, his metal detector was lying in the sand. He was kneeling, digging a hole. He didn’t see me coming and soon I was just a few feet away, standing over him in his labors. He was concentrating hard, flinging handfuls of sand into a pile next to him, his mouth clenched, brow furrowed. His forehead was dripping with sweat. I was waiting for him to look up and see me. He didn’t.

“So what are you actually looking for?” I asked after a while, when it was clear that he might keep going forever without ever realizing I was there.

Dad startled at the sound of my voice. He was thrown off-balance and fell back onto his haunches, where he looked up at me sheepishly like someone who’d been caught at something.

“Hey there, Tiger,” he said, trying to play it off. “How’s your day going?”

“Terrible actually,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to think about it.

“What are you doing?” I asked again. It wasn’t rhetorical, even though it seemed that way. I was starting to get the feeling that the treasure-hunting thing was more than just another one of his stupid hobbies. It was different from the yoga and the knitting circle and the book club, all of which he’d given up in a matter of weeks.

This time he had committed himself, falling deeper and deeper into it every day. He was truly searching. And not just the general kind of searching either. Seeing the way he was digging, it dawned on me that he was trying to find something specific—something more than the piles of gold he’d mentioned when he’d first started his quest.

“What are you looking for?” I asked him when he didn’t answer me. “What’s the treasure?”

“
Blackbeard’s
treasure,” he said, sounding both pleased that I was interested and mildly frustrated that I had to ask. “People have been looking for it for centuries. It’s got to be around here somewhere.”

This was getting ridiculous. “All that stuff you’ve been bringing home doesn’t look like Blackbeard’s treasure,” I said. “Or anyone’s treasure. Don’t you think you’ll know it when you find it? It’s got to be sort of impressive.”

Dad was still digging. He would humor me, but he had more important tasks at hand than answering my dumb, obvious questions.

“You know, Tiger,” he said, looking up at me for just a second as he tossed a handful of sand. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been here.”

I was surprised. I’d figured that my father had picked this beach as our destination spot through one of his usual decision-making methods: a Groupon or a flyer posted on a telephone pole or a travel segment on the local news channel. It hadn’t occurred to me that he had wanted to come back to a place that had once been good to him.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yep. About thirty years ago, Tiger. Hard to imagine I was ever your age, huh?”

“I guess,” I said.

“That’s when I first heard about the treasure. People were always talking about it but supposedly no one ever found it. But over the years I’ve been thinking. What if the treasure was disguised somehow? What if someone
did
find it, but it wasn’t what they expected? Maybe they thought it was junk and tossed it right back?”

“So what you’re saying is that the priceless treasure might be an old fork or a screwdriver or a crappy earring? Or whatever stuff you’ve been finding out here and hauling back to the house in that dumb bucket?”

The big orange bucket Dad had taken to carrying around with him was lying on its side next to the metal detector. I picked it up and perused its contents. There was only one thing in it so far: a small coin. I took it out to look at it more closely: it was a euro, probably dropped in the sand by some German tourist.

“Well at least it’s
money
,” I said, letting it clink back into the bucket. “If you ever go to France you can use it to buy a fancy French gumball. It’s a start. But I don’t think they even had euros in the days of pirate legend.”

“Legendary, Tiger.
Legendary.
That’s exactly the right word. The treasure is legendary. But you can’t trust a legend. First rule of treasure hunting, buddy. Legends get confused. There’s always some truth to them, but if you get too hung up on the details, you’ll usually miss what’s right in front of your face. Unless you remember that, you’ll miss something in a place like this. There are lots of legends around here.”

“Like the Lost Colony?” I asked.

Dad tipped his head like he’d misheard me. Then he beamed.

“Exactly like the Lost Colony. Exactly.” I had finally gotten his attention, and now he stopped digging. He looked up at me expectantly, prideful and thrilled, all
that’s my boy.

A sense of hopefulness hung in the air as he waited for me to say something else. But when I didn’t, his face fell again and he went right back to his work, resigned to the fact that I would never get it.

I didn’t care at all what he was talking about. Dad’s treasure hunt was obviously a total waste of time. But wasn’t everything around here a waste? “Want some help?” I asked. Why not? Without DeeDee or
The Price is Right
to occupy me, I now had nothing but time to kill.

He looked at me suspiciously. He had gotten used to me trying to trick him with good humor.

But I wasn’t fucking with him this time. I got down on my knees and started to scoop. We began to dig a hole together.

It was harder work than I’d expected it to be, but after a few minutes the task became more and more satisfying. I started to see how it wasn’t as much of a waste of time as I’d thought—I still didn’t expect to find anything, but at least we were
doing
something, making some kind of measurable progress. The pit was deeper and deeper by the second, the two of us working together. After a summer of walking in circles, thinking I was going somewhere always to wind up back where I’d started, it was nice to be doing something that was resulting in a basic, straight line, getting straighter and longer, even if in the least useful direction imaginable.

So we kept digging, uncovering nothing. The sun moved overhead. My muscles were aching and my back was sore. I kept going. I wasn’t actually planning on stopping. I wasn’t expecting him to stop either. But finally he did.

“Aw, fuck it,” Dad said. “Your old man’s not as young as he used to be. There’s not anything here. I’m never going to find it.” A week ago I would have told him he was right, to just go ahead and give up, but now I didn’t want to see him disappointed.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Maybe not today, but you’ll get there eventually.” I stood and Dad stood too. He thumped me on the back and looked over his shoulder.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll walk you home.” I picked up the bucket, and he picked up the metal detector and slung it over his shoulder. He looked like an old, tired Huck Finn. We started back for home. Dad was whistling, which normally drove me crazy, but at that moment I didn’t care. I may have even whistled along with him myself.

Eventually the song petered out and we walked for a bit in silence. “So what’s going on with you and Mom?” I asked. “Why do you think she’s back?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “She won’t even tell me how she found us.” He looked at me sidelong, posing a question.

I wanted to ask him about DeeDee, but I knew that I couldn’t deal with the monologue that would inevitably follow if I did. “Do you want her to stay?”

“I want her to do what makes her happy,” he said. “That’s all she’s trying to do. I actually admire her for it, sort of.”

“Give me a break,” I said.

“You’ll understand when you’re my age,” Dad said with a shrug. “One day you look around and realize all the choices you thought you were making might have been the wrong ones. That they might not have even been choices at all. Actually, I hope you don’t understand. That’s why I brought you here, I guess.”

I had stopped paying attention. I was only thinking of what I had done wrong. Of how I had found the thing I had been looking for and how I had lost her so quickly.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

FOURTEEN

I STAYED AWAY from DeeDee like she obviously wanted me to. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s getting messages. I had misjudged the situation at first, but now I understood. Just like Kristle said, I’d gotten my hopes up. DeeDee had blown me off the way I’d blown Sasha Swain off a million years ago. And if DeeDee didn’t want to see me I wasn’t going to be a stalker about it.

It was annoying, then, that she was the one who would not leave me alone. In fact, she was more present to me these days than ever. Even if only in an imaginary way. I hadn’t seen her since she’d blown me off at the restaurant a week ago. I kept expecting her to come find me, but she didn’t. I was thinking about her all the time.

Every time I came out of the surf I’d look up into the distance, hoping to spot her approaching through the dunes. Several times I thought I saw her rolling from the waves, even though I knew she couldn’t swim. Every time I smelled cigarette smoke, I thought it might be hers, and when I turned around and saw that it wasn’t, I would wonder: What was she doing now? What about five minutes ago, or five minutes from now? She seemed capable of existing in past, present, and future all at once, as if it was no thing, as if the linear notion of time was something she brushed off as silly and irrelevant and possibly offensive to her—
oh, that?